Cover

Also available by Conor Brady

Also available by Conor Brady

The Eloquence of the Dead

A June of Ordinary Murders

Dedication

For my beloved Ann,

I shall face the stars and greet you there.

Introduction and Acknowledgements

As with its two predecessor volumes, chronicling the life and times of Detective Sergeant Joe Swallow (now promoted to detective inspector), the backdrop to A Hunt in Winter is drawn from social and political conditions in 1880s Dublin. And as with A June of Ordinary Murders (2012) and The Eloquence of the Dead (2013), the narrative blends fact with fiction, while real life characters of the era mingle with others of my own creation. It is hardly necessary to state that A Hunt in Winter is a novel, not a history book.

I would like to acknowledge the many readers who have furnished me with additional information on some of the locations, institutions and individuals that feature here as they did in the earlier books. The store of local history of late-nineteenth-century Dublin appears to grow incrementally, as does that of Irish policing history.

As with the first two Joe Swallow books, I would like to acknowledge the support and professionalism of the team at New Island Books, in particular Dan Bolger and Justin Corfield, in bringing A Hunt in Winter to fruition. In an interval in my life during which circumstances made it difficult to write creatively, Dan was patient and indulgent. Justin was, as ever, a scrupulous, exacting and supportive editor.

I would also like to acknowledge the support and enthusiasm of my literary agent, Maria White, who has succeeded in bringing the Swallow books to a wider readership abroad.

—Conor Brady

Dublin, September 2016

Dublin

Friday November 2nd, 1888

Prologue

The girl clutched her shawl tightly around her shoulders against the night chill. But once she had crossed the Portobello Bridge to the Rathmines Road the walkway was firm and reassuring. The smooth surface helped to ease the discomfort in her leg. The rate-payers of the new affluent suburbs to the south of the city could afford good roads, which contrasted with the broken, uneven pavements within the old City Corporation area.

The ground here is hollow and low. When the wind is still and the night is moist, the mist that rises from the Grand Canal lingers and thickens. Tonight it had quite overwhelmed the gas lamps’ feeble efforts at illumination. But she knew her route well. She could see the faint glow from the Portobello Cavalry Barracks that lay beyond Blackberry Lane, where she lived. To her left she could faintly make out the darkened bulk of the Roman Catholic Church of St Mary Immaculate.

There was no sound of any other person on the footpath, but she was accustomed to the silence of the road at this late hour. The public houses that she had passed on Camden Street and South Richmond Street had been noisy and filled with loud-voiced men and women bawling and shouting. Out here it was as quiet as the countryside. A new terrace of lawn-fronted red-brick houses was hidden across the road in the fog. The southern side, along which she now made her way, was still bounded by meadow fields.

She sensed the pressure of the cold air pushing behind her a moment before she heard the hissing of the steam tram on its outward run from the city. When she glanced over her shoulder she saw it forming out of the mist behind her, its bull’s-eye lamps deploying a meagre illumination over the cobbles. She caught a momentary glimpse of passengers in the dimly lit interior. Men with hats, huddled in overcoats, drawn in tight against the November air. Two or three tired-looking women, probably making their way back to the houses where they worked in service. It would be the last tram from the city for the night. She heard the church clock strike the half-hour after eleven as the vehicle disappeared into mist.

There was no street light where Blackberry Lane rose from the fields to meet the road, but she knew the bramble hedges that grew at the place where she would turn. She could make her way blindfolded to the cottage at the end of the rutted laneway. Even in the darkness, she knew how to navigate the cart tracks, ankle-deep with rainwater. She knew how to avoid the thorns and the nettles on either side. She could not afford to destroy her boots or muddy her waitress uniform.

Perhaps ten yards up the lane, she knew, a wooden gate gave entry to the meadow field. The children of Blackberry Lane were in and out through it, winter and summer, tolerated by the farmer who accepted the futility of trying to keep them out in the first place. Now it was invisible, obscured by the mist. But she knew that something was wrong when she heard the scrape of its iron bolt being drawn back.

She had walked the lane many times in darkness. She was not frightened by its night sounds. Foxes, rats, badgers, sometimes a wandering cow pushing its head through the bramble. But she knew that none of these creatures could draw a gate bolt. She froze, straining to see through the fog.

The first blow came out of the darkness, taking her across the mouth and nose. It was solid and hard, not a fist or a hand. She felt teeth splinter in her mouth. The second blow came to the side of her head, setting off an explosion of red and yellow stars behind her eyes. Immediately she felt the warm blood flowing into her mouth and down her face. She tried to scream, but the sound caught in her throat. Her legs buckled and she pitched forwards, face downwards, into the mud.

Now the man was on her from behind. One hand came around her cheek and clamped across her mouth. The other pushed a rough rope down over her head and around her neck. The noose bit deep into her skin, and she heard him grunt as he dragged her towards where the gateway opened to the field. Once in there, she knew, it would be hopeless. She gasped for breath, scrabbling at the hand clamped across her mouth, but he was too strong and his grip too tight.

She felt mud and stones against her face as she tried to clutch at the reedy grass on the laneway’s edge. Then, a foot or two from where she knew the gate opened into the meadow, her hand found a jagged stone, perhaps the size of an apple. She fastened her fingers around it, pushed herself upwards as best she could and swung the stone with all her strength. She felt it connect with his head, and the hand across her mouth flew away. She heard him scream in pain. The rope slackened as he fell back. She drew in air, rolling, squirming away into the thorny ditch.

Now she found herself in a space of earth where the brambles had thinned. Perhaps a fox’s run or a badger trail. She tried to undo the rope that was still knotted around her neck, but her fingers were slippery with the blood from her head and face. Somewhere in the laneway she heard a shouted call. Then another. Men’s voices. Running footsteps in the fog. She started to feel a shivering warmth that travelled from her legs and then ran upwards through her body. She felt a weightlessness. Her hiding place seemed to darken, and there were no more sounds.

Saturday November 3rd, 1888

Chapter 1

Swallow disliked Saturdays. Most policemen felt that way, he reckoned. Perhaps more precisely, Swallow disliked the day that followed Friday night. Friday was payday for those citizens of Dublin fortunate enough to have employment, however poorly rewarded it might be. By late Friday night a sizeable proportion of men’s meagre wages would be on the way back to the breweries and distilleries—Arthur Guinness, John Jameson and John Power. There was always trouble on Friday nights: street fights, brawls in public houses, misadventures of every variety, with broken bodies in the hospitals and sometimes dead ones in the mortuary.

Because the Dublin Magistrates’ Courts did not sit on Saturdays, the police cells were invariably filled to capacity. And with the growing trend for businesses to give employees a half-day off on Saturday afternoon, it was often impossible to advance police inquiries after noontime. Many commercial offices closed for the afternoon. Schools closed at noon, releasing their charges to engage in whatever mischief might present itself. Invariably, the latter part of the day was forfeit.

Swallow’s strategy to offset Saturday’s adversities was to start the day earlier. The morning crime conference at Exchange Court, the headquarters of G-Division at Dublin Castle, was ordinarily timed for nine o’clock. The night’s crime tallies would be set out and the day’s tasks allocated. But on Saturdays he brought it forward to half past eight. That way he could ensure that all available detectives were at their posts or out on their inquiries for the full duration of the morning.

Since his promotion to detective inspector, Swallow had sharpened up procedures at Exchange Court. His predecessor, Maurice (‘Duck’) Boyle, since elevated to superintendent and posted to take charge of the E-district, headquartered in leafy Rathmines, had been notoriously lazy and undemanding. Swallow, on the other hand, insisted on punctuality and a strict adherence to procedure. Report-writing had to be accurate, clear and up-to-date. Cash drawn for informants had to be accounted for in full and not frittered away on unnamed and often fictitious informants in public houses. There was grumbling from some, but the greater number among the G-men, as the detectives short-handed their designation, supported his approach.

The bedroom on the top floor above M & M Grant’s public house on Thomas Street, in the old city quarter known as the Liberties, was cold when he woke. He looked past Maria’s sleeping form beside him to the window and saw that the glass was fern-patterned with the first frost of winter. He rose, then washed and shaved quietly across the corridor in the room which, for the sake of decorum, was always referred to as ‘Mr Swallow’s room’. As far as outward appearances were concerned, the young, widowed Mrs Walsh and the detective inspector were simply landlady and tenant. Maria’s servants knew differently, of course, as did many of the patrons of M & M Grant’s, Maria’s public house below. So too did most of Swallow’s senior colleagues in G-Division, even though it was against police regulations to board on licensed premises, much less to share a bed with the licensee.

The servants observed the fiction of attending to the tenant’s room in accordance with respectability and convention. Each morning Swallow would leave his soiled clothing in the linen basket in his room to be collected for laundering later in the day by Tess, Maria’s housemaid. Every evening Tess carefully laid out a clean collar and shirt at the foot of the bed and changed the water in the glazed pitcher on the washstand.

It required concentration to work with the razor, soap and cold water in the dim morning light. Although most of the G-men followed the fashion of the time with moustaches or beards, Swallow preferred to go clean-shaven. It made him look younger than his forty-three years, he reckoned. Maria said she thought so too.

The morning darkness had not fully dissipated when he stepped out into Thomas Street through the side door that gave private access to the living quarters above the public house.

At St Catherine’s Church, where the rebel Robert Emmet had been executed after the abortive insurrection of 1803, he saw that the November frost had whitened the classical pediment and the black roof slates. He passed the Municipal Art School where on Thursday afternoons, duty permitting, he indulged his sole diversion from police work in the painting class led by Maria’s sister, Lily. Then he crossed High Street and Corn Market before flanking Christ Church Cathedral towards the Castle.

The streets were quiet. Dubliners were neither early to bed nor early risers. The city’s trams did not stir until eight o’clock, when they started from their depots. Shops did not open their doors until half past nine. Many professional men considered it unseemly to be at their rooms before ten. The only sign of life at this hour was a uniformed constable, motionless and solid, surveying the silent thoroughfare from Lamb Alley.

He caught the tang of hops from Guinness’s brewery at St James’s Gate, and a couple of hundred yards farther on the husky smell of barley wafted in the air from Power’s distillery on John’s Lane. It was telling, he sometimes reflected, that while other cities might smell of coal or food or human sweat, Dublin smelled primarily of alcoholic drink in the making.

He quickened his pace so that he would be at his desk by eight o’clock to review the night’s crime reports from the Dublin Metropolitan Police’s seven divisions. Any serious business, he knew, would very likely come from A, B, C or D, which served the city within the canals. E-Division and F-Division, covering the affluent suburbs to the south as far as Dalkey, rarely saw much crime or outrage.

Swallow was more at ease living back in the Liberties. During the previous year he rented a small house near Portobello, sharing it with his sister, Harriet. It suited her because it was close to the school in which she taught on the South Circular Road. But at the start of the new school year, and with his promotion confirmed, he had returned to live with Maria over Grant’s.

The public house had come down in the female line, but it kept the name of Maria’s grandfather Michael, who ran the business with his brother, Matthew. When Maria married Thomas Walsh in 1882 she saw no need to change it. The marriage had been happy but tragically short. Thomas drowned with his fellow crew members when the small cargo ship of which he was first officer went down in a gale off the Welsh coast five years later.

From Grant’s, it was just a ten-minute walk to the detective office at Exchange Court, beside the City Hall. On a sharp, clear morning like this the exercise was stimulating. It loosened the muscles and cleared the head for the tasks of the day. He listed them mentally as he walked. At least those he could predict. Nobody could guess what the night’s crime reports might bring in.

G-Division’s fifty-odd detectives investigated crime across the city, and were also the administration’s first and principal bulwark against political subversion. Their responsibilities ran from protecting the chief men who governed Ireland for the Crown to keeping watch on Fenians, Land Leaguers and the ever-multiplying groups that wanted, for one reason or another, to overthrow the established order.

The uniformed men who patrolled the divisions were unarmed, indistinguishable to all intents and purposes from the helmeted bobbies of any other city of the United Kingdom. But in addition to the standard police accoutrements of baton, whistle and handcuffs, every man of G-Division carried a .44 Webley Bulldog revolver.

Swallow considered what the day might bring. There was to be a public rally at the Mansion House in the afternoon. It would be addressed by the founder of the Land League, the charismatic one-armed militant Michael Davitt. Davitt was a powerful orator and would always draw a crowd. It would require half a dozen G-men, spread across the great Round Room of the Mansion House, to record the presence of suspected persons and to take down an account of what was said from the platform.

The leader of the Irish Party at Westminster, Charles Stewart Parnell, was travelling from London and would arrive at Kingstown on the four o’clock mailboat. Two G-men would be on hand. Officially they would be on protection duty, but there would be as much surveillance and intelligence-gathering involved as protecting Parnell from possible threats. They would carefully record who accompanied him, who greeted him at Kingstown and where they went.

The government’s principal civil servant for Ireland, Chief Secretary Sir Arthur Balfour, and his wife would be attending a luncheon at the Royal Dublin Society at Ballsbridge. The ultra-loyal RDS was the least likely location for trouble, but since the murders five years previously in the Phoenix Park of the chief secretary’s predecessor in office, Sir Frederick Cavendish, along with his under-secretary, no chances could be taken. The protection detail would require the presence in concealment of two armed detectives and a sergeant.

Three G-men were engaged in watching the movements of two Irish-American gentlemen staying at the Imperial Hotel. The word from a helpful porter was that they were former Union Army officers with guns to sell. So far their principal focus appeared to be on drinking whiskey and making passes at the barmaids, but they had left word with the porter that they were expecting visitors. G-men would be required to take shifts sitting in the hotel bar, watching for someone to make a rendezvous.

Swallow also needed two men to operate the public office and the cells at Exchange Court. That should leave him with a paltry strength of three or four to cope with whatever the crime reports might bring in.

The moment he stepped into Exchange Court he knew from the face of the young G-man at the public counter that things were not good.

‘Bad story out in the E, sir.’ He jerked his head towards the stairs. ‘Sergeant Mossop’s above. He’s just ahead of you.’ Pat Mossop had been duty sergeant for the night shift that had just ended. Swallow took the stairs to the crime office two at a time.

Mossop, recently promoted to detective sergeant, was hunched at his desk. Detective Johnny Vizzard, newly arrived in G-Division on promotion from uniform, was perched beside him, his fingers poised over the typewriter. Mossop looked tired, as he always did now. A year ago the diminutive Belfast man had taken a bullet in the upper torso as G-men closed on an armed suspect on Ormond Quay. Strictly speaking, Pat Mossop should have been dead. Had his colleagues not got him swiftly to the infirmary on Jervis Street, he would have been.

‘Something big, Pat?’

‘Big enough, boss. E-district. Rathmines Road. A bad assault. Could be more than that. I thought I’d have the report done before you came in.’

‘Tell me.’

‘I’m just back with the lads from the Baggot Street Hospital. A young girl was attacked in Blackberry Lane off the Rathmines Road some time towards midnight. She’s in a bad state. The doctor says she mightn’t come through it.’

‘How much do we know?’

‘A fair bit. But there’s no idea yet who might have done it or why.’ He flipped his official notebook open. ‘Aged eighteen, name of Alice Flannery, lives with her mother and a gaggle of brothers and sisters in a cottage at the end of the laneway. The mother’s widowed, makes a few bob as a cleaner at the big church on the Rathmines Road. Seems Alice helps her on the cleaning job, but mostly she works as a waitress at the New Vienna restaurant down in South Great George’s Street.’

Swallow knew the New Vienna. It was a short walk from the Castle.

‘What do we know of her movements last night?’

‘She left the New Vienna to walk home around quarter past eleven after they’d cleaned up and shut for the night. Sometime before midnight a couple of cavalrymen tried to use the lane to slip into the barracks after lights. They heard a commotion and literally stumbled across her.’

‘Robbery? She’d have likely been paid her wages, finishing up on Friday?’

‘Maybe. She had no money on her when she was got to the hospital. No bag or anything. But it was so damned dark her things could be anywhere around the laneway.’

‘What’re the injuries?’

‘No sexual attack, though that doesn’t mean it wasn’t the motive. Her skull is badly fractured on the right side. Nose broken. Cheek-bone broken on the other side. Doctor reckons about six teeth splintered. Mouth and lips lacerated. There’s what looks like a bad rope burn or something such on the neck. Lots of scratches and cuts. It looks as if she got away into the brambles and then crawled out again. The doctor says she was beaten with a blunt weapon, maybe a heavy bar or a club of some kind. She’s lost a lot of blood.’

‘Is she conscious? Could she tell you anything?’

‘Not a lot that’s coherent. They put her under with a good dose of laudanum. The doctor was afraid that her heart would fail. Johnny took a note of what little she did say.’

Vizzard shrugged. ‘She just said “dark”, “noise” and then “the pain, the pain”. Then she said, “Me uniform’s ruined.” But she won’t be going waitressing again for a long time.’

Swallow drew up a chair.

‘She might have been doing a bit of amateur whoring on the side? Maybe the two soldiers were doing business in the laneway with her? What did they have they to say?’

Mossop grimaced.

‘That was my first thought too. But I don’t think so. They were well soused after a night in McCabe’s tavern. One of them ran out onto the Rathmines Road, roaring for a bobby. There was a beat man, Jack Caviston, at Leinster Road. He judged that the young fella was hysterical. If they’d done it, they wouldn’t have come running for a polisman.’

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